Predicting a user's preference in a short anonymous interaction session instead of long-term history is a challenging problem in the real-life session-based recommendation, e.g., e-commerce and media stream. Recent research of the session-based recommender system mainly focuses on sequential patterns by utilizing the attention mechanism, which is straightforward for the session's natural sequence sorted by time. However, the user's preference is much more complicated than a solely consecutive time pattern in the transition of item choices. In this paper, therefore, we study the item transition pattern by constructing a session graph and propose a novel model which collaboratively considers the sequence order and the latent order in the session graph for a session-based recommender system. We formulate the next item recommendation within the session as a graph classification problem. Specifically, we propose a weighted attention graph layer and a Readout function to learn embeddings of items and sessions for the next item recommendation. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two benchmark E-commerce datasets, Yoochoose and Diginetica, and the experimental results show that our model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.
CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → Recommender systems.
Different from the traditional recommender system, the session-based recommender system introduces the concept of the
session
, i.e., a sequence of interactions between a user and multiple items within a period, to preserve the user’s recent interest. The existing work on the session-based recommender system mainly relies on mining sequential patterns within individual sessions, which are not expressive enough to capture more complicated dependency relationships among items. In addition, it does not consider the cross-session information due to the anonymity of the session data, where the linkage between different sessions is prevented. In this article, we solve these problems with the graph neural networks technique. First, each session is represented as a graph rather than a linear sequence structure, based on which a novel
F
ull
G
raph
N
eural
N
etwork (FGNN) is proposed to learn complicated item dependency. To exploit and incorporate cross-session information in the individual session’s representation learning, we further construct a
B
roadly
C
onnected
S
ession (BCS) graph to link different sessions and a novel Mask-Readout function to improve session embedding based on the BCS graph. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two e-commerce benchmark datasets, i.e.,
Yoochoose
and
Diginetica
, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposal through comparisons with state-of-the-art session-based recommender models.
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